Just Going To Be
by KatherineGrace79
Summary: Based on the prompt "You'd think, with so much practice, Remus Lupin would be better at saying goodbye." Takes place after the end of the First Wizarding War in 1986.


_Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and I am not associated with it in absolutely any way for, if I was, I would be lying on a beach in the Seychelles with my own personal monkey butler._

**Just Going To Be**

**Prompt:** _"You'd think, with so much practice, Remus Lupin would be better at saying goodbye."_

It was the quiet _tick-tock-tick-tock_ of the plastic green clock that hung on the yellow wall of the kitchen that had his heart tightening in his chest and his vision clouding over. He suddenly felt very alone and the feeling grabbed at his tender muscle and squeezed until he struggled for breath, hands reaching out with a tremor to grasp hold of the nearest surface, propping his body up and he bowed his head, eyelids descending over hazel eyes and he breathed. He had never paid any attention to the sound that the clock made but he had never had any need to for it hadn't been silent in his small stone cottage for a very long time, or at least it hadn't felt silent. It had felt full with warmth and love and happiness and he had thought maybe, just maybe, everything was going to be all right.

How foolish he was.

He knew, perhaps better than anyone, that life always threw curveballs just when everything seemed good and happy. He had felt the tension, the anxiety, building within his muscles, taking root beneath his scarred skin and settling there like an old friend that was neither particularly wanted nor liked all that much. It had haunted his every morning, overshadowed every happy moment once the initial euphoria had faded until he was left with the steadfast knowledge that _this couldn't last_. His fingers tightened on the kitchen work surface that he had grasped and he pushed away, regaining his stride as he moved into the living room only to instantly alter course and push outside, unable to bear the barrenness of the room that had only recently been filled with odd trinkets and curious pictures, books scattered haphazardly on various surfaces, always open, half-read as the mind rushed from one to the other without pause.

The garden was a neutral location. He had never had green fingers, unlike his mother who could spend hours outside digging up flowerbeds and planting herbs and flowers and medicinal plants that she would carefully cultivate and then harvest for her husband and son. He had enjoyed sitting on the garden path or the crooked patio that his father had proclaimed to be completely straight and flat, even though the third slab from the left was quite clear at an angle. Those years as a boy seemed so far away and it made his head hurt when he thought that, really, it had only been little more than a decade for he had always remained close to his parents, he had never drifted far from them. Perhaps it was to do with his affliction or perhaps it was simply to do with the fact that they were his parents, but he had never gone far, which was why the memories stretched into his teenage years and his burgeoning adulthood.

He was quietly relieved to take up his usual stoop on the ground, even though his joints protested at the position – once comfortable and easy at six and sixteen, not so at twenty-six. The garden was just as his mother had left it before she had died, the cancer finally eating away at her body even though it had been forced to concede the battle for her soul. Nothing could have made his mother relinquish the joy that she had felt for life, even when she had been crying and screaming at night from the pain that the disease wrought on her physical form. It was only now, years after her death and the pain of losing her had lessened slightly, that he felt envious of her lust for life. It wasn't a trial and a hardship that it was for her only child, it was something to be relished and embraced.

One hand absently curled around a fistful of grass and yanked, pulling the blades up with clumps of dirt and he rubbed it between his hands, gazing forlornly out over the garden. He wondered why it still hurt him so much. After all, with all of the people that he had lost over the years, surely saying goodbye should have become easier, not harder. Was it because of the simple fact that she was still alive? All the people he had been forced to say goodbye to had died, most of them long before their time, whereas she had left him, unable to stay any longer as he was unable to give her what she wanted. The thought of what she wanted made his heart ache and he drew his knees up against his chest, hugging them there, resisting the urge to bury his face against his limbs.

Children.

How he longed for children, a wife, a family to call his own. He wanted nothing more than to arrive home to the soft, warm embrace of a wife who looked at him with love in her eyes, who accepted him beyond measure, and a bushel of children with his love for reading and knowledge and a more than healthy dose of mischief that he knew ran through him. He wanted that. He wanted it so much that he had had to turn from it, to turn from the woman who offered it to him because he couldn't risk it. It was a foolish dream, one that he could never fulfil, and he sighed, rubbing his eyes against his knee, bony and harsh.

His family had died five years ago and he could not replace them. He could feel himself falling into the depression that he had struggled so hard to leave as images, memories, of happier, better times raced through his mind. Red hair blurring with black, green eyes laughing with him (and sometimes at him), three boys who had become men, brothers in arms and spirit, wrenched apart by treachery and death. A small child, little more than a baby when he had last seen him, orphaned and alone, never knowing the parents who had loved him and the uncles who had doted on him.

The empty house behind him suddenly seemed all the more daunting and silent. He knew he would eventually have to release his legs and rise from his feet to continue living; after all, the only thing left for him now was to live. It was a pale existence, one that he had thought he had escaped, the life he had been condemned to twenty years earlier when a feral beast had sank its yellow, sharp teeth into his side and infected him; the life that had been put on hold by the presence of his friends, his brothers, and then by the warmth of the first woman who had loved him.

They were all gone now. He had been left behind again and he slowly leaned back until he was lying flat on his back staring up at the blue sky, dark clouds creeping in from the distance, ready to unleash their anger on the ground and he sighed.

He would eventually rise. He would eventually go back inside and the pain of the goodbye would eventually fade until it was little more than a memory, a point in his life where he could have taken another path, but, for the moment, he was just going to be.

**Fin.**

**Author's Note:** _This story is very loosely related to the prompt at the top, which I gained, from one of the Harry Potter forums. I started out writing it with a different story in mind but as my fingers flew across the keyboard, something entirely different came out and it was a bit more internal and thoughtful than I had intended. However, it is about Remus Lupin feeling a little bit sorry for himself and feeling alone after a relationship had ended. I don't think it's my best work but I'm putting it out in the ether anyway. Please review and tell me what you like/dislike about it and any improvements._


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